Margia Argüello was just a few months old in 1984 when her mother brought her from Managua, Nicaragua, to the United States. “So, she comes to the U.S.,” says Margia, “and she files for political asylum. And the INS is like, ‘Oh, we can help you, but we need a letter from your employer stating that you’re in imminent danger.’ And of course her employer is the Daniel Ortega government, so she just had to get a lawyer. So she never was able to get political asylum.” The attorney recommended that Margia’s mother – and her father when he joined them the following year – should apply for a work visa, so that at least they would have some kind of a legal status. “The work status happened right away. They got the work visas, but to become permanent residents, that took sixteen years.”
These images come from a dog-eared scrapbook that Margia has kept all these years. The pages are crammed with her childhood drawings. It’s what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words.
The Argüellos settled in Miami, and initially it was Cubans who helped the family with networking. Then, in the late 1990s, several Cuban and Nicaraguan politicians got together to lobby for NACARA – Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act – and Margia’s family was right at the cusp of this movement. NACARA was advocating for permanent residency and citizenship for people who had come in the 1980s from countries like Cuba and Nicaragua because of the governments there. “So they were able to state a case for people like us,” Margia says. “There was an amnesty, so that’s how we were able to get our permanent residence.” Every year, during the sixteen years that it took for the family to get permanent residence, they had to submit documents “updating that we were here and paying taxes and going to school and all that jazz,” and years later, when Margia applied for citizenship, she remembers going in to see the agent, and he had a stack of papers, like a book of life – report cards from kindergarten all the way up to high school.
The question that Margia is struggling with now is where home is for her. After growing up in Miami, she got her undergraduate degree from Cornell University in upstate New York, and she moved to Baltimore twelve years ago to pursue a post-baccalaureate, followed by a Masters in Science, at Johns Hopkins University. Now, she is an Associate at Johns Hopkins Medicine International. “I’ll find it,” she says about her quest for a home. “Baltimore for a while, but maybe it’s time to move on.”
Margia’s extended family is scattered all over the world now – Canada, Australia, Oregon, California, Mexico, Costa Rica, Miami. “What is our family?” she wonders. “Who are we?”